Game Characters Research Articles

Deep Learning of 3D High-Precision Model Digital Engraving of Next-Generation Games Based on Artificial Intelligence

In order to improve the intelligence of the next-generation game model, a new game artificial intelligence came into being. Through the in-depth understanding and research of the next generation of game model production technology, the current industry general production process is summarized, and a set of effective production methods is expounded. In the context of the rapid development of digital technology, the game industry increasingly recognizes the importance of digital carving technology for the design and production of the next generation of games. The design and production of the next-generation game model can make up for the lack of refinement of the traditional next-generation game character model and the unreal mapping effect. This paper focuses on two ways: behavior tree and machine learning, designing game AI with more anthropomorphic perception and flexible behavior. Finally, the basketball player competition AI designed with a behavior tree and machine learning demonstrates its intelligent behavior.

Indigenous Video Games in Libraries

There is a recent movement known as Indigenous Futurisms that examines Indigenous perspectives within the context of technology. In relation to this, video gaming continues to be one of the fastest growing forms of new media, yet diversity in the industry is still an issue. There is especially apparent with a lack of proper representation of Indigenous video game characters and Indigenous storylines. While this is starting to change with the recent rise of a handful of Indigenous owned gaming studios and creators, there are still challenges around accessibility for game play. Video games made by Indigenous creators or with Indigenous characters are for the most part non-existent in most public library collections. When we discuss decolonization in libraries, video games as a popular form of media are often overlooked and not viewed as valuable educational tools that encourage literacy and creativity. This paper suggests changes that can be made to ensure that video games that share Indigenous Knowledges and traditions or are made by Indigenous creators are made accessible and are represented in library collections and spaces.

What influences season ticket holders’ satisfaction and renewal intention? the role of season ticket service quality

ABSTRACT Purpose: The current study investigated the influence of service quality factors on season ticket holder (STH) satisfaction and intention to renew their season tickets. The current study was particularly interested in exploring the unique contribution of the season ticket-specific service quality on STHs’ satisfaction and retention in the context of professional sports. Design/Method: Data were collected from 646 STHs from a Major League Baseball (MLB) team using an online survey. The findings from the hierarchical multiple regression models confirm the influence of the STHs’ team identification, three gameday service quality dimensions (game, facility, and interaction qualities factor), and the season ticket service quality (STSQ) on their level of satisfaction and intention to renew their season tickets. Findings: Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that all groups of predictors contribute to predicting STH satisfaction and intention to renew, together explaining 42.4% and 34.7% of the variances in satisfaction and renewal intention, respectively. Results showed the importance of the season ticket service quality in satisfying and retaining STHs, even after controlling their team identification and gameday service quality. Originality/Value: The findings of this study provide helpful tips for sport managers to ensure important service qualities and train their service employees accordingly.

Theorizing the Player-Playable Figure Relationship

The paper revisits a central question in the study of characters in digital games: Do players of, for example, a racing game steer the virtual car directly themselves, or are they controlling the body of a virtual driver? This seemingly technical question is shown to be primarily cognitive and conceptual: players draw on their real-life and fictional frames of reference in an ongoing epistemological process of situating themselves vis-à-vis gameworld and playable figure. The traditional metaphor for this relationship, that of a cyborg, neither captures the variety of relationships suggested by games, nor the range of interpretations open to players. To overcome this limitation, I propose six conceptual types, based on the significance that tools and vehicles have for the playable figure. I ask: is there a co-dependence between equipment and user, is it permanent, and do they have a metonymic relationship to each other? These abstract categories are shown to be connected to archetypical proto-narratives epitomized by characters from mythology and popular culture, which players implicitly refer to in conceptualizing their relationship to the gameworld. The essay, then, offers a framework for the conceptual variety of player-playable figure-relations, which, in drawing on cultural history, should be equally transparent to scholars of game studies and narratology.

Towards Post-Phenomenology and Posthumanism

The paper revisits a central question in the study of characters in digital games: Do players of, for example, a racing game steer the virtual car directly themselves, or are they controlling the body of a virtual driver? This seemingly technical question is shown to be primarily cognitive and conceptual: players draw on their real-life and fictional frames of reference in an ongoing epistemological process of situating themselves vis-à-vis gameworld and playable figure. The traditional metaphor for this relationship, that of a cyborg, neither captures the variety of relationships suggested by games, nor the range of interpretations open to players. To overcome this limitation, I propose six conceptual types, based on the significance that tools and vehicles have for the playable figure. I ask: is there a co-dependence between equipment and user, is it permanent, and do they have a metonymic relationship to each other? These abstract categories are shown to be connected to archetypical proto-narratives epitomized by characters from mythology and popular culture, which players implicitly refer to in conceptualizing their relationship to the gameworld. The essay, then, offers a framework for the conceptual variety of player-playable figure-relations, which, in drawing on cultural history, should be equally transparent to scholars of game studies and narratology.

A Survey on Reinforcement Learning Methods in Character Animation

AbstractReinforcement Learning is an area of Machine Learning focused on how agents can be trained to make sequential decisions, and achieve a particular goal within an arbitrary environment. While learning, they repeatedly take actions based on their observation of the environment, and receive appropriate rewards which define the objective. This experience is then used to progressively improve the policy controlling the agent's behavior, typically represented by a neural network. This trained module can then be reused for similar problems, which makes this approach promising for the animation of autonomous, yet reactive characters in simulators, video games or virtual reality environments. This paper surveys the modern Deep Reinforcement Learning methods and discusses their possible applications in Character Animation, from skeletal control of a single, physically‐based character to navigation controllers for individual agents and virtual crowds. It also describes the practical side of training DRL systems, comparing the different frameworks available to build such agents.

Response: Composite Avatars and the Epistemology of the Playable Figure

The paper revisits a central question in the study of characters in digital games: Do players of, for example, a racing game steer the virtual car directly themselves, or are they controlling the body of a virtual driver? This seemingly technical question is shown to be primarily cognitive and conceptual: players draw on their real-life and fictional frames of reference in an ongoing epistemological process of situating themselves vis-à-vis gameworld and playable figure. The traditional metaphor for this relationship, that of a cyborg, neither captures the variety of relationships suggested by games, nor the range of interpretations open to players. To overcome this limitation, I propose six conceptual types, based on the significance that tools and vehicles have for the playable figure. I ask: is there a co-dependence between equipment and user, is it permanent, and do they have a metonymic relationship to each other? These abstract categories are shown to be connected to archetypical proto-narratives epitomized by characters from mythology and popular culture, which players implicitly refer to in conceptualizing their relationship to the gameworld. The essay, then, offers a framework for the conceptual variety of player-playable figure-relations, which, in drawing on cultural history, should be equally transparent to scholars of game studies and narratology.

Centaurs and Horsemen: Composite Avatars and the Epistemology of the Playable Figure

The paper revisits a central question in the study of characters in digital games: Do players of, for example, a racing game steer the virtual car directly themselves, or are they controlling the body of a virtual driver? This seemingly technical question is shown to be primarily cognitive and conceptual: players draw on their real-life and fictional frames of reference in an ongoing epistemological process of situating themselves vis-à-vis gameworld and playable figure. The traditional metaphor for this relationship, that of a cyborg, neither captures the variety of relationships suggested by games, nor the range of interpretations open to players. To overcome this limitation, I propose six conceptual types, based on the significance that tools and vehicles have for the playable figure. I ask: is there a co-dependence between equipment and user, is it permanent, and do they have a metonymic relationship to each other? These abstract categories are shown to be connected to archetypical proto-narratives epitomized by characters from mythology and popular culture, which players implicitly refer to in conceptualizing their relationship to the gameworld. The essay, then, offers a framework for the conceptual variety of player-playable figure-relations, which, in drawing on cultural history, should be equally transparent to scholars of game studies and narratology.

The Moral Service of Trans NPCs: Examining the Roles of Transgender Non-Player Characters in Role-Playing Video Games

Before 2020, no big-budget, mainstream video games featured playable transgender characters, relegating them instead to the role of non-player characters (NPCs). Through a textual analysis of Bioware’s 2014 title Dragon Age: Inquisition, Ubisoft’s 2016 Watch Dogs 2, and Naughty Dog’s 2020 The Last of Us Part II—three role-playing games that feature explicitly transgender NPCs—and a discourse analysis of media surrounding the games’ release, this paper examines the narrative roles afforded to transgender characters. Drawing from the “magical Negro” trope in film studies, I propose the term “magical transness” to describe the unique role of transgender supporting characters whose victimization provides the opportunity for cisgender protagonists to act heroically. This paper interrogates transgender representation and its relationship to media discourses about diversity and inclusion and discusses the political implications of transgender NPCs’ placement in roles of moral service.

Summoning Ghosts of Post-Soviet Spaces: A Comparative Study of the Horror Games Someday You’ll Return and the Medium

This paper aims to analyse the tension between the universal themes of the horror genre that are appealing for the global public and the local character of the digital games developed by smaller companies/studios from the semi-peripheral countries of Central and Eastern Europe. To examine in-game representation of game spaces as well as the authorial intention and production processes behind their inclusion, we combine close readings of the two titles with interviews with their designers of two digital games: Someday You’ll Return and The Medium. Both games target an international audience but heavily feature real-life domestic locations and landmarks. The digitally represented physical space is also a vehicle for the narration, which is centred around memories of personal trauma of the in-game characters. While using the concepts of hauntology, postmemory, and folk horror, we try to understand the process of creating stories that appeal to an international audience but is heavily rooted in very specific local folklore (Someday You’ll Return) or painful national history (The Medium). This phenomenon can lead to both popularisation of new aesthetics in global market, as well as to perpetuating stereotypical narratives about national cultures and histories.

"I should have liked to produce a good book. It has not turned out that way"

Wittgenstein wrote in the Preface to the Investigations that he would have liked to write a good book, but it didn’t turn out that way. This may superficially seem to be false modesty, given that what he wrote is a masterpiece. This paper argues that it is not false modesty, and attempts to pin down various flaws in the book, some structural and others not. These include the opening quotation from Augustine, the thin character of language game 2, the rule following considerations, the private language arguments, and the poorly located, well-disguised and over-compressed discussion of the pictoriality of the proposition and critique of the picture theory of meaning in §§428–65.

QoE modeling for audiovisual associated with MOBA game using subjective approach.

With the advancement of multimedia communications and information technologies, online video games have become very popular recreational activities worldwide, while Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games have gained immense popularity from game players in recent times. Therefore, based on quality of experience, audiovisual quality evaluation models for MOBA games have been proposed in this study. The subjective data from 210 game players (both males and females) about audio quality during conversation, the video quality, the overall quality, and the weighted percentage of video and voice have been collected from small competition events of the Garena ROV (Arena of Valor) in Hua Hin, Thailand. The data from 160 game players have been used to create the models, while the data from 50 game players have been applied for model performance evaluation. After developing the models, Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) technique has been utilized for model evaluation. On completion of this study, it was found that two thirds of the proposed models provide better performance than the other previous works. All of them, called MOSAudiovisual-MOBA1 model, MOSAudiovisual-MOBA2 model and MOSAudiovisual-MOBA3 model, show excellent performances with MAPE values of 4.95%, 5.92% and 4.75% respectively. Therefore, excellent performance of these proposed models becomes one of the contributions of this study. Also, this evidence of excellent model performance makes the proposed models ideal for utilization for assessment of audiovisual quality of the MOBA games. All audiovisual quality evaluation models provide excellent efficiencies.

Contours of virtual enfreakment in fighting game characters

Characters in fighting videogames11Hereafter we refer to videogames in the fighting genre as “fighting games.” such as Street Fighter V and Tekken7 typically reveal a phenomenon that we define as virtual enfreakment: their bodies, costumes, and fighting styles are exaggerated (1) in a manner that emphasizes perceived exoticism and (2) to enable them to be easily visually and conceptually distinguishable from one another. Here, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, including crowd-sourced surveys and analyses of game mechanics, we report on the contours of virtual enfreakment in those games. We specifically examine differences in character design across gender, national-origin, and skin-color lines. Disappointingly but not surprisingly, we find racism and sexism manifest as stark differences in character design by gender and skin color. This has strong implications because taking on the roles of these characters can have impacts on users in the physical world, e.g., performance and engagement, behavior, and understandings of others (Lim and Harrell 2015; Şengün 2015; Yee et al. 2012, Şengün et al. 2022a; Harrell and Veeragoudar Harrell 2012; Kao and Harrell 2015; Şengün 2014; Kocur et al. 2020). Although the differences are not always straightforward, female characters and darker-skinned characters (typically, characters of color) are enfreaked differently than their light-skinned male counterparts. Our results also reveal the strategic use of “unknown” as a country of origin for villainous characters. Through our mixed-methods analysis, we examine in detail how virtual enfreakment is influenced by sexism and racism, and our findings are compatible with information about the development history of the Street Fighter and Tekken franchises. However, we also find that recent characters designed in dialogue with developers from their regions of origin are some of the least enfreaked and most positively portrayed—suggesting the possibility of designing and deploying such characters for implementing anti-bias character designs within popular videos..

Biogaming Limbo: Ressentiment of the New Era in Sion Sono’s Tag

Dealing with the unstable (virtual) realities that are repeatedly constructed in the film Tag (2015), Sion Sono explores entirely new forms of amusement in the realm of transhumanism. In the following text, I will discuss the concept of ressentiment in light of a master-slave relationship between the gamer/fan and an objectified game character, meant to entertain the transhuman subject. From the perspective of critical theory, the film is further examined as a disturbing reflection of the gender issues in both Japanese and global media environments but read in contrast to the prevalent opinion of those critics who perceive it as misogynistic. Article received: January 10, 2022; Article accepted: February 1, 2022; Published online: April 15, 2022; Original scholarly article

Welfare and fairness in free-to-play video games

Are free-to-play (F2P) video games reducing consumers’ welfare? How do changes in the game balance affect players? Despite being the most relevant business model in the video game industry, no consensus exists on the welfare implications of free-to-play (F2P) video games. This work proposes a theoretical economic model that explains why companies prefer F2P to pay-to-play (P2P) in the long term and how game fairness is determined in the short term. In the long term, the consequences of player welfare depend on the quality and network effects of the video game. In the short term, the impact on welfare depends mainly on the relationships among in-game items. Thus, welfare implications are likely to change as new items are added/removed. Finally, we test the theoretical models by estimating the fairness level in three F2P video games and show preliminary evidence that this business model would have reduced welfare.

Developing Techniques for Rigging and Motion Capture to Simplify 3D Animation

Our project focused on finding ways to simplify 3D animation by streamlining the rigging process and by using motion capture data. Rigging is a method of creating a “skeleton” for a 3D model to be manipulated and animated while motion capture uses recorded movements to animate a 3D character in movies and video games. Previous methods such as manual rigging and keyframe animation are time consuming and difficult for novice animators to learn. We sought a faster approach that would allow us to teach 3D animation to beginner students in a single semester. Using a more efficient rigging process and multiple motion capture sources, we have created an online library of motion-ready 3D character rigs and a variety of pre-captured animations for use. Our rigs can be animated by beginners in less than five minutes and were used to support the first course in 3D Animation at Florida Gulf Coast University.

AI intelligent wayfinding based on Unreal Engine 4 static map

The development of games is closely related to the development of game engines. Unreal Engine is a mainstream game development engine. Unreal Engine has a powerful lighting rendering function and blueprint programming system.Therefore, using Unreal Engine for game development will better meet the requirements of modern game users for game quality and game content. In games, the AI path-finding system is often the core of a game. However, the path-finding component of the unreal engine is usually only applies to three-dimensional game and is used for intelligent path-finding in dynamic environment. Howerve, the 2D game usually finds the way in static environment. At present, there are a lareg number of path-finding algorithms and theoretical studies based on static environment, but there is no simulation experiment and detailed explanation of intelligent path-finding in static environment based on the Unreal Engine platform. This article firstly explains the principle of path-finding algorithms that are several commonly used in static environment. Then it compares the performance of different algorithms, and selects the optimal solution among several schemes by summarizing the experimental results. Then based on the optimal path-finding algorithm, using blueprint programming to implement AI path-finding in the Unreal engine. Finally, this article sort out and summarize the overall work process and indicate direction for future optimization.

오리엔탈리즘 이론에 기반한 동아시아 게임 캐릭터 선호도 분석 - 동양과 서양 게임 캐릭터 심미적 차이의 융합을 중심으로 -

Orientalism provides a new perspective and theoretical framework for analyzing the relationship between the West and the East, especially when movies, novels, and video games have become the source of ideas for research. By integrating multidisciplinary knowledge, this paper made a qualitative and quantitative research on the aesthetic differences between the East and the West from the perspective of the theory of Orientalism, to make a preference analysis on the basis of a critical analysis of the design features of East Asian game characters in today

Method for the Development of Accessible Mobile Serious Games for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) covers a range of neurodevelopmental disorders that begin in early childhood and affects developmental activities. This condition can negatively influence the gaining of knowledge, skills, and abilities, such as communication. Over time, different techniques and methods have been put into practice to teach and communicate with children with ASD. With the rapid advancement in the field of technology, specifically in smartphones, researchers have generated creative applications, such as mobile serious games, to help children with ASD. However, usability and accessibility have not been often taken into account in the development of this type of applications. For that reason, in this work we considered that both, usability and especially accessibility are a very important differentiators for the quality and efficiency of mobile serious games. Our approach has two important contributions, the incorporation of accessibility as a fundamental requirement in the development of a mobile serious game and the proposal of a method for the development of this type of applications for children with ASD, a method that can be used by other developers.

Multifunctional device integrating dual-temperature regulator for outdoor personal thermal comfort and triboelectric nanogenerator for self-powered human-machine interaction

Reasonable depletion of energy resource to realize energy affair is critical to ever-lasting advancement of human society, such as passive thermal management strategy and self-powered technologies, promoting emergence of integrated and functionalized energy device. Here, series of multiply-utilization-type composite nanofibers were prepared by electrospinning to apply for personal thermal comfort and tactile triboelectric nanogenerator (T-TENG). Our heating/cooling pattern enables a skin simulator’s temperature increase/decrease of 8.7 ℃/2.5 ℃ respectively under sunlight exposure. Thermoelectricity was utilized to transform the heat into electricity with a maximum voltage of 157.6 mV. Besides, with optimization of structure and materials of T-TENG, optimum output performance with open-circuit voltage (VOC) of 215.1 V, short-circuit current (ISC) of 2.54 μA, transfer charge (QT) of 70.72 nC and superior effective peak power density of 362.58 mW m−2 were acquired. Furthermore, a self-powered game controller with signal acquiring and processing circuits for manipulation of game characters was achieved, and the International Morse Code that relay on motion recognition was first time realized with assistance of machine learning. The flexible and self-powered T-TENG manifests an imperative application value in electronics for HMI and wearable device.